Get More Quality Leads From Your Landing Page, With Live Chat

You want to convert a high proportion of your landing page visitors, right? Of course you do. More conversions mean more revenue.

But you don’t want just any old conversions. Well you might...but gaining some decent information about new leads, when they convert, helps you to produce more revenue down the line.

The more you know about B2B leads for example, the better your sales team will understand how to convert them into customers. Low quality leads are hard to convert and valuable sales time can be wasted.

And the more information you have about B2C leads, the better you’ll be able to personalise your product offering. Meaning you’re not just getting a conversion on your landing page but lots of conversions at the checkout.

Trouble is, that form at the bottom of your landing page (that you’re using for lead generation) has a catch-22.

Ask for more information from your visitors and they are less likely to convert. Ask for too little and you don’t really know anything about these people that you’re adding to your CRM system.

I’ll admit that it’s a pretty old stat that has been bounced around for a while but the premise still stands. Asking for more information means asking for more trust. And it’s hard to instill trust through a website form.

So how does live chat come into all of this? Well it can help you to increase form completions (to get a high quantity of leads) even when you’re asking for a few more qualification/differentiation criteria (hey presto, higher quality leads).

A website form doesn’t instill trust, but a human can. Use live chat correctly and you can get the kind of conversions that your business needs. Here’s how.

Build Trust With Human Interaction

So you’ve created an awesome new landing page to sell your awesome product (if you haven’t created it yet, get your LanderApp account now and start creating!). And at the bottom of the page you have a form that the visitor needs to complete in order to become a lead.

But wait. You’re asking for their contact details, maybe their personal or business buying behaviours and a few more personal details. Have you ever stopped to think this is a little too much for someone that has probably only read this one page of your website?!

I don’t know about you but I think this relationship is moving a little too fast. The “it’s not you, it’s me” must be coming soon.

Well...actually...it is you!

You’re asking for too much when there isn’t actually a relationship there (you and the visitor have probably never even spoken with each other). If there was a bit more of a relationship between you, you’d have a little more trust and they’d be willing to make that form completion commitment.

So give visitors that opportunity to have a relationship with you. Provide live chat as an opportunity for visitors to reach you with questions, and an opportunity for you to reach them proactively if they look like they need some help.

Then have a real conversation with them via chat. Don’t get salesy, just be human. This instills trust and increases form completion (even with those slightly more intrusive form fields).

It might be hard to believe but it’s surprising how much more trustworthy you become after a little text based communication.

And if you do it properly you can get even more information than your form is asking for, so that you can prioritise your leads and focus on those of the highest quality.

Interact at the Right Time

Live chat isn’t just a channel for creating an early relationship with potential leads, it’s also an opportunity to give them the other tools and information that they need to convert.

Visitors that haven’t got all of the information that they need, or that have hit some other sort of conversion barrier, leave. You could remarket to them but you should be making the most out of their current website visit now.

These interactions can be important for visitors that are about to leave your landing page. If they haven’t seen the information that they were hoping to find, engagement can be important in encouraging them to take the next steps.

Live chat is the perfect tool for providing these instant, personal interactions that can increase form completion. It can act in a similar way to bounce tools you’ve seen before...you know, the ones where you move your mouse towards the top taskbar and you get a pop up encouraging you to stay.

But with live chat, it isn’t just the initial invite that should be personalised. It’s the whole conversation. Live chat is kind of like a human bounce tool basically.

But, how do you time these interactions in your chat software? Well it of course depends on your software and your coding skills but here are a few general tips:

If you’ve got coding skills or a developer to hand

The long and short of the JavaScript that we use is that it tracks the visitor’s rapid mouse movement up to the top taskbar.

The coding sends a custom variable to our live chat software, which prompts the beginning of an interaction.

If you aren’t the next Zuckerberg

Well the best thing would be to interact with those that don’t seem to be completing your form, or taking too long to complete your form. You can do this is based on time on page. Someone spending ages on the page might need your help in completing your form.

This is a basic option that pretty much any live chat software will track. Look at your website analytics data and segment it to see the average time on page for those that complete your form (X seconds).

Anyone taking longer than this might not have the tools to convert, you should program your software to invite them to chat after X seconds...so that you can help them convert.

Don’t Be Obtrusive

These personal interactions really can increase the quantity and quality of leads that come from your landing page forms.

In fact these interactions can be used across your website to help visitors progress through the conversion path. Use them too much or in an obtrusive manner though and it could have a negative effect!

The important thing to remember is that you’re trying to add to the visitor’s experience. Don’t ruin the UX of a landing page or distract visitors from converting.

Rule 1: Overlay Rather Than Pop-Out

You want your visitors to be able to use live chat as they browse your page...how else are they going to complete the form that your chat is encouraging them to complete?

Live chat that pops out into another browser window makes for a bad landing page experience. Don’t do it, you’ve been warned.

Use a design that only takes up a small portion of the screen and just overlays your existing page.

Is your lead form and chat box at the bottom right of the page? Switch the form or chat to the other side so that when a conversation starts, it doesn’t block the form.

With the help of an expert, you can even use a form within your chat window...so you can convert a higher quantity of quality leads directly from your conversation.

Rule 2: Don’t be Too Eager With Proactives

If your invite to chat is too early, you’ll disrupt visitors that are already having a good experience.

You need a deep understanding of your website, plus some thorough testing and optimisation, to get the best results from live chat. Invite people to chat too early and they might not have had chance to even consider completing your form yet.

If you are inviting people to chat based on average time on page but you’re not getting many responses (or visitors are even saying you’re trying to chat too soon), reign your invite back. Try timing your live chat invite to be 10 to 20 seconds later and test the effect. This is a simple adjustment but a good place to start.

Setting up a proactive live chat invite is the easy bit. Optimising it is the hard bit.

Conclusion

The whole purpose of your new, shiny landing page is to convert more visitors into leads. A high quantity of leads alone won’t cut it however because you also want to be able to convert these leads into customers at the next step.

It goes without saying that not every lead will convert into a sale...but the higher quality your leads are, the more chance they have of converting.

A quality lead is a lead that has a relationship with your brand before they talk to sales, and who you know enough about to personalise conversations to their needs.

Trouble with relying on landing page forms to generate leads is the catch-22 of them.

Ask for more information from your visitors and they are less likely to convert. Ask for too little and you don’t really know anything about these people that you’re adding to your CRM system.

Live chat, done properly, can fix this catch-22. You can engage those that would otherwise abandon and build the trust needed to get the lead information that you want.

Post Author

Miles Hobson

Content Manager at The Chat Shop. Miles read Economics at Aston University; he now produces insightful content that allows companies in an array of industries to increase their sales and make customers happy.

Miles Hobson

Content Manager at The Chat Shop. Miles read Economics at Aston University; he now produces insightful content that allows companies in an array of industries to increase their sales and make customers happy.